


If I Had A Heart

by JRW9699



Category: Arrow (TV 2012), Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - No Powers sort of, Calling It a Relationship Might Be Stretching It, Character Study, Clark Kent Bashing, Dark Kara Danvers, Dark Oliver Queen, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Gold Kryptonite, Hate Sex? Sort Of?, Kara Danvers is Not Okay, Oliver Queen is Emotionally Stunted, Swearing, These Guys Do Not Have A Healthy Relationship, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-13 07:28:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29274711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JRW9699/pseuds/JRW9699
Summary: At age thirteen Kara Zor-El arrived on Earth broken and damaged but was taken in and trained by her cousin and The Justice League. Oliver Queen came back from Lian Yu broken and damaged but with a mission; save his city, by any means necessary.Both are souls marred with anger, Kara kept hers buried under the surface while Oliver’s defined his mission. In the natural order of their respective words, they never should have met. The damage done when they do could change everything for good.
Relationships: Kara Danvers/Oliver Queen, Oliver Queen/Kara Zor-El
Comments: 44
Kudos: 54





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This one is going to be fairly dark. I don't want to say much of anything in this first note, since the real story doesn't begin until chapter two. Most of everything that goes on below is basically the establishing shot of this story. I will say this much, I'm stretching these two to their extremes. I was almost tempted to put this under my Dark Multiverse collection but I didn't think it went quite far enough to justify that.   
> While I have the key plot details for this nailed down, the ending is in flux right now. I have three potential options; one "hopeful", one neutral, and one straight up depressing. I think I'm going to judge which ending to give this story by the reactions I get as we progress through it. Which is my way of saying, if you're so inclined, take the time to drop me some comments so I know how everyone feels about this universe. 
> 
> That all said, enjoy!

Gold kryptonite . . . could be . . . permanent . . . promise . . . cure.

 _I’m sorry_.

Kara hadn’t really taken any of it in. There was a numbness slugging its way through her body in ways she hadn’t felt since she had been a teenager. She had been on Earth for little over ten years, all that time she had known who she was.

Yes, the last daughter of a dead world, the last one who actually remembered it. She had watched her whole planet, everyone and everything she had ever so much as _seen_ gone in a second. For most people that would have broken them, torn their mind apart and left them a wreck. Kara was fuelled by it. The anger at the loss of her world, at the bureaucrats who let it die, it drove her. When she trained with her cousin to learn her powers, knowing she could help protect the world, she let that anger give her everything she needed. Kal told her over and over to keep it buried, and Kara did that as best she could. She knew that if she became who she really was underneath, the humans would fear her.

Over time she became used to pretending. Kal could never understand the loss of their planet the same way she had. He didn’t remember Krypton, everything he learnt about their home world came from Jor-El’s data crystals. When Kara first arrived on Earth, Kal had been given twenty-six years to come to terms with being the last of his kind, he was thrilled to find another Kryptonian, one who was family. For Kara, the day she crashed on Earth was subjective minutes after she had watched her planet die. Part of her had been conscious while she had been in The Phantom Zone, but in no way meaningful enough for her to process what had happened.

So, she let Kal take her. The cousin she was sent to Earth to protect had grown up without her, and into mankind’s greatest hero. He told her that they had incredible powers to use in service of the people of Earth, and she had leapt at every opportunity she was given to learn. It was no Krypton, but the strange group of family Kara found in the members of The Justice League, living in an orbital satellite high above planet Earth patched over some of the hole left by her world.

The anger fizzled down. What once had been the very thing that enabled her to adapt to her powers years faster than Kal-El did slowly lessened as Kara spent more and more time pretending that she wasn’t outraged at the universe.

Even after a decade on the planet, she never did understand Earth’s nuances. Kal told her that they could only go where the governing powers on Earth told them they could go, that their Super-Personas couldn’t just sweep in to stop every mugger and common crook. At first, Kara hadn’t minded. Fighting only powerful aliens or Lex Luthor’s advanced robotics was better. She didn’t have to hold back on those, she wasn’t living in a world made of cardboard. As she got older, it made less sense that they couldn’t act all the time.

There were hundreds of heroes in The Justice League, most of which lived on The Watchtower most of the time. Together, properly organised and deployed, crime would cease to exist. They could do so much for the world if only they were allowed to. She had stopped asking Kal why around the time of her twenty-first birthday. Every time she would, he offered her a placatory smile and the same words

_“It’s their world, Kara. They have taken us in, we have to let them do what makes them feel safe.”_

When Kara would point out that the whole point of The Justice League was to make people feel safe, Kal would smile and shake his head.

_“They’re only human.”_

It started to make sense to her when Project Cadmus were developing weapons to contain The League. When Lex Luthor hacked into the Binary Fusion Generator and used it to destroy a few city blocks in an attempt to turn the people against them. When even Batman questioned if they had gone too far.

By the time Kara had begun to question it, there was no room left for change. The Justice League was restrained by endless governmental legislation. They could only act when it was sanctioned. The more threats they defeated, the less threats seemed to come. With so few attacks delivered on a scale that The League was sanctioned to get involved in, most of their members saw no action for weeks at a time.

Kara had been spoiling for a fight when Green Lantern called her in to join them in Metropolis. She had been watching the fight on the news, but Kal had always insisted that she avoid jumping into combat unless called for. She had made it to Metropolis from National City in a little under three minutes. Kal had been offworld, and Green Lantern had decided they needed the muscle of a Super to give them an edge against Ultra-Humanite.

With little more thought than wanting to land a punch, Kara had barrelled towards Humanite. Then, she had blacked out and woken up with a broken arm and bruises all down one side of her body and most of her back.

She had been _whammied._

That was how Barry explained it to her when she woke up in the Medical Bay onboard The Watchtower. Kal had been there too, nervously glancing between her and Barry. She had been comatose for nearly a week, and the yellow sun lamps hanging over her bed had done nothing for her.

Kal had sent Barry out of the room before telling her the truth.

Humanite had invited a new form of Kryptonite. Gold. Designed specifically to work on Kara’s DNA and bind her cells from absorbing yellow sun radiation. Proximity to the mineral had completely destroyed her ability to process sunlight, her powers were gone. Nearly a week since the fight and there was no notable change. Once he had been captured and questioned, Humanite had insisted that the damage would be permanent, that nothing they could do would bring back Kara’s powers.

The sickening numbness she had felt when Kal told her that hadn’t subsided in the six weeks since she’d heard it.

Despite her cousin’s promises that they would find a cure, Kara hadn’t believed him, not really. Kara had lost everything that made her who she was once, a second time was enough to make her hope bleed away. So, she had run. Drained her bank account so that Kal wouldn’t be able to easily trace her and gotten on train after train. Travelling all over the country in an attempt to find something, _anything_ , to spark her soul again.

She had ended up, somehow, in Star City, walking through the claustrophobic streets in the dead of night. Then her anger at the world had led to her in an alley, with four knife-wielding men.

Without her powers, Kara knew she had only a slim chance to fight them all off. She had never learnt hand-to-hand combat in any seriousness, Kal had always taught her to reply on her abilities. Despite that, she as Kara Zor-El, last daughter of the great House of El. She wouldn’t go down without a fight.

She broke the wrist of the first creep that had lunged at her with a faint sickening glee at being able to fight without her powers, but the bastard had nicked her wrist with his blade in the process. Kara had felt the droplets of blood welling up in the cut as the other three men advanced.

Then _he_ appeared.

She had heard rumours of him; overheard comments during The Founders meetings that she wasn’t supposed to listen in on, murmurs that he had been the one to train Black Canary, but never anything solid.

There was a brutal elegance to the way he fought. Vicious and cold, but beautiful in a way. It took him seconds to put the three remaining men on the floor, all of them unconscious and faintly bleeding.

Then, he was walking up to her, and Kara felt herself tensing in fear and anticipation.

And he spoke to her.

“So Supergirl, want to tell me what you’re doing in my city?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before we get started, this whole story was written while listening to the album Fever Ray. I first heard 'If I Had A Heart' in The Following way back in like 2013, and for some reason that popped into my head while I was working on my plan for this story. The whole album did a great job of setting the mood of this universe for me, as well as the follow-up album Plunge. So, I'd recommend listening to those while reading because I think it'll set the mood for you guys too.

Of all the things Oliver had seen in his time, Supergirl appearing in Star City and ending up the victim of street-level muggers was certainly on the more surprising end of things. He kept tabs on most members of The Justice League though various means, but every time one of them made the news he got an alert. The last Supergirl sighting had seen her and a handful of other League members going up against Ultra-Humanite in Metropolis. Oliver had studied the footage of the fight intently, it wasn’t often Supergirl was so easily taken down. With little to go on beyond some shaky cell phone camera footage, Oliver had given up trying to figure out what had happened.

That had been over a month ago. 

Why Supergirl had turned up suddenly, and seemingly powerless, in Star City was certainly a question that he needed answering.

Before Lian Yu Oliver had seen the Justice League parade around the world with their self-righteous authority and thought little of them. After his time on the island, working for ARGUS, Oliver had come to realise that the world was a much more complicated place than he had ever thought. It had been a side-effect of living a privileged life that he had never considered until too late, that he had been sheltered from realising the shades of grey that plagued the real world. His time with Amanda Waller helped dispel his delusions and made him come to terms with how the world really worked. It hadn’t taken much longer for those ideas to catch up to how he thought of the Justice League.

There was a danger in their existence. Individually, every member of the Justice League was powerful enough, but alone they had stayed humble to a degree. Mostly, they had kept to their own cities and only worked together when it was needed. A little more than fifteen years after Superman had first shown up in Metropolis and the Justice League was a disaster waiting to happen. A superpowered army stationed out of an orbiting space station that was invisible to almost every government and individual across the planet. Amanda Waller had been convinced that they would turn against the people one day and decide to rule over the rest of humanity, and that humanity wouldn’t stand a chance.

It wasn’t a fear that Oliver shared.

In The Quiver alone he had enough weaponry to fight off almost the entirety of the Justice League thanks to files carefully lifted from ARGUS, LuthorCorp. and Cadmus Labs. If they ever did turn, it was an eventuality that Oliver was ready for.

The real fear was how easily they could be swayed. In the last few years Oliver had watched as The Justice League found themselves tied up in more and more bureaucratic red tape. They had grown too large, too powerful, and the governments of the world had decided to rein in and control that power. Charters with the UN, individual nations refusing to sanction any actions committed by the Justice League in their territories. The Justice League had seized up, unable to so much as stop a mugging without signed approval from the United Nations. On more occasions than Oliver was happy to admit The League had been forced into acting against the people. Of course, it was always spun as being done in the name of keeping people safe. It never looked that way to him.

On top of everything else, the final nail in the coffin, was the children. He had noticed it even before becoming The Green Arrow. Almost every member of The League, at one time or another, toted around a child as a sidekick. It has only been one or two at first, hardly noticeable against the backdrop of destruction and violence left in the wake of The League. Over time it became more and more obvious, until the sidekicks were organised in their own teams. Children and teenagers, roped in to fight a war that they had no business being involved in.

Supergirl herself had been one of them. By Oliver’s reckoning, she had been only fifteen the first time she suited up and fought alongside her cousin. It had been the same year Oliver returned from Lian Yu. He had still been in Russia at the time but even there the appearance of a new all American Superhero had made top billing.

It hadn’t taken him long after getting home to Star City to figure out who she really was. Waller had a few solid guesses as to the secret identities of dozens of members of The League, though more than half of them had turned out to be wrong. Free of ARGUS and Waller’s ever watchful eyes Oliver had doubled down on investigating each and every member of The League once he was in Star City. A few chance meetings had helped him to narrow down even more information to the point where there wasn’t a single member of The Justice League who was unknown to him.

Maybe it was paranoia, a lot of people would certainly have said as much.

Supergirl turning up in his city was cause enough for Oliver to be assured that his investigation of The League was the right thing to do.

Oliver had never been entirely sure whether or not The League knew about him. In the eight years he had been operating as The Green Arrow they had never made a move to recruit him the way that they had every other vigilante and hero in America. Though a part of Oliver had always wondered if that was because they knew he would refuse. To the best of his knowledge, there wasn’t a hero on the planet who had turned down the invitation to join The League or one of its subsidiary groups. It wouldn’t have looked good for them to have him turn them down.

Even then, hardly anyone admitted to his existence. Ever since returning to Star City, Oliver had made it a cardinal sin of his mission to be noisy. He never wanted to become a symbol, an ideal to look up to. From the beginning he had been a scalpel, cutting out the criminal element from his city and fading back into the night. Thanks to a few well-hidden backdoors into certain government agencies, Oliver knew that there was a mandate to eliminate The Green Arrow being pushed by the White House. Despite the government’s reluctance to acknowledge him, they wanted him dead. So long as they could do it without admitting he existed.

It wouldn’t have surprised him if that was the reason that The League ignored him. They were under orders not to make a spectacle of him. It would legitimise his actions too much. That would cause embarrassment all around. So, they were forced to leave him alone until the right opportunity presented itself.

Just the thought of the anger that must have caused both parties brought a smile to Oliver’s lips.

From Supergirl’s reaction to him Oliver suspected she had, at the least, heard rumours of him. There was a look in her eyes at seeing him that was somewhere between disbelief and surprise, a thinly veiled irritation there too. That much made sense to him, it wasn’t every day that Supergirl needed to be saved, certainly not from a group of would be muggers. And, if Oliver’s guess was right, she didn’t have her powers.

It had been complete chance that he had been in the right area of The Glades when she was attacked. She hadn’t called out, hadn’t tried to get help. Oliver had just happened to be on the right rooftop to overhear the threats the group of men made carried on the wind. She had done admirably before he arrived. One of the men had been clutching what looked to be a broken wrist, but the other three had continued to advance on her unperturbed. That alone had been enough for Oliver to suspect she didn’t have her powers once he recognised who she was.

With the adrenaline spike of the fight waning and his surprise at seeing Supergirl stood in front of him faded, Oliver had clarity enough to confirm his suspicions. A small droplet of blood that dripped down from one of her fingers. At first glance Oliver wrote it off to the injury she had inflicted on her attacker, but when new droplets welled up in the seconds that passed he realised she was the one bleeding.

“Are you hurt?”

His question seemed to prompt something in her. With the muggers out cold, Oliver had turned off his voice modulator. Maybe it was the sound of a normal voice, maybe it was her shock wearing off at his cold statement that he knew her identity, maybe it was something else. Whatever it was, it kicked Supergirl into reacting.

“I-uh-I’m not…” She stumbled over her words.

“You’re bleeding.”

“I’m not Supergirl.”

The lie was hardly told with enough conviction to persuade a child, but Oliver ignored it.

“Your wrist,” Oliver fixed his bow to the magnetic hook on his quiver and reached out with one hand. “Let me see.”

Oliver surprised himself with the care he was showing to her. From the glimpse of the wound he had seen it was little more than a small cut, nothing that would leave any serious damage behind. Unless the situation was dire, he never stayed behind to help patch people up. It went against his first rule, it left him exposed. Offering to help with such a minor wound was far from his usual actions.

It surprised him even more when Supergirl held out her arm to him.

Gently taking her arm in one hand, Oliver turned it over to look at the wound. There was a ragged line cut in the fabric of her sweater sleeve and a faint red trickly beneath it. Carefully, Oliver rolled up the sleeve to reveal the cut under it. He had been right. The wound wasn’t substantial, a small nick in the flesh barely deep enough to draw blood, only the length of the slash caused blood to well up in it. With his free hand, Oliver reached into one of the pouches at his hip, produced a thin piece of tape and laid it over the wound.

The gel worked into the bandage was a propriety compound being designed in the labs at LuthorCorp. There was a nanite substance built into the gel that told any damaged cells it came into contact with what to do and, more to the point, how rapidly to do it, while at the same time damping down any signals sent from pain receptors. On minor wounds the substance could cut down healing time from a few days to a matter of hours. Oliver wasn’t sure how effective it would be on Supergirl’s alien DNA, but at the least it would stop the bleeding.

Supergirl flexed the fingers of her injured arm. The faint trembling Oliver had noticed there had subsided significantly. As gently as he had taken it, Oliver released his hold on her arm. For a moment, she held it where it had been, then slowly dropped it back to her side.

“Thank you.” Her voice was quiet, her eyes still not looking to meet his own.

There was a stretch of silence between the two of them, only broken by the faint noises of the city.

“Why are you in Star City, _Kara?”_

The use of her name seemed to hit harder than when he had called her Supergirl. Instantly, her façade of fear and hesitation into herself dropped. Kara squared herself upright and fixed him with a piercing gaze that might have shaken loose feelings of fear in anyone with less conditioning than Oliver.

“How do you know who I am?”

Part of him wanted to laugh. How it was more people didn’t figure out the identities of Earth’s protectors was beyond Oliver. With a focused mind and enough time there were few members of The Justice League that could hide their identities well. Superman and his cousin were two of the worst. Clark Kent had been too easy to figure out, but Oliver did have the advantage of owning his own satellite system with which to track his flight patterns. From there the leap between Kara Kent, cousin of Clark, to Supergirl, cousin of Superman, was laughably easy.

That answer was not one he could give to her.

“I keep an eye on individuals with power like yours.”

Internally, Oliver scolded himself. That answer had been none more helpful than if he had laughed. It was beyond evident in her stance that Kara did not trust him. She knew of The Green Arrow, that much was clear, but whatever she had heard would have come through dripped information and rumours of a system that loathed him.

Yet still there was something about her that gave Oliver the inkling she was unlike the others. There was an edge to her that he was unfamiliar with seeing in the members of The League that paraded around the planet. Something about her that told him she was different.

“You don’t have your powers.” Oliver observed when Kara said nothing. The silence between them continued to stretch out until Oliver tired. “Are you going to talk to me or just keep glaring?”

Kara’s gaze hardened on him for a moment. “I don’t see any reason to trust you.”

The decision Oliver made in that moment was one that he would question as long as he lived.

Almost unconsciously, Oliver lifted up one hand and brushed back his hood. He felt the fabric pool around the back of his neck as he plucked off his mask.

_“Oliver Queen?!”_

_XXX_

When she had finished telling it, hands still wrapped around the empty mug of tea he had provided, Oliver found it a little hard to believe. Kryptonite had come up dozens of times in his research into Kryptonians, though only the green variant had held any interest to him. That there existed a gold variant that had the ability to strip a Kryptonian of their powers permanently was a surprise to him completely.

“Tailor made to stop me apparently,” Kara said when Oliver questioned it. “Uniquely coded to my DNA to stop my powers.”

That ruled out the possibility of gathering some for himself to add it to the collection of weapons that were tailored for used against members of The League. As wide as Oliver’s reach was, he would be hard pressed to get a sample of Superman’s DNA, and even if it was possible he was far from having the knowhow to successfully weaponize it into the Gold Kryptonite that Kara had told him about. Then again, he reasoned, if Supergirl had been exposed to it first it was likely to have been a trial run. It had clearly worked, the woman sat across from him was totally powerless. It made sense that Superman would be next.

Bringing Supergirl to The Quiver was something of a risk. Oliver had already given her his identity, something no member of The Justice League was privy to. Giving her the location of his main base of operations was an even greater risk. She had enough information to give to The League, or directly to the government, and they would have all that they would need to take him off the board quietly. Playing it mysterious was the reason Oliver had managed to go as long as he had done without making himself too big a target. His identity had been kept secret at many a great cost. Then he had given it away without hesitation to a woman he hardly knew.

The something he had seen in Kara which had given him ground enough to trust in her, had made itself more apparent the more time he spent with her. Kara was a lost soul. Without her powers she had lost her sense of identity. She had been Supergirl for near half of her life, certainly for almost all of the time she had been on Earth. Knowing that her powers were gone, and permanently if Ultra-Humanite was to be believed, had stolen away most of who she had been. There was a chasm in her sense of self that would be near impossible to fix.

It was a sentiment that Oliver understood, even if he had never felt it himself to that extent. Just the idea of giving up The Green Arrow, giving up the thing that allowed him to do so much good for the world, brought up an ache in his chest. For over a decade he had lived that life. Not all of it had been good. There was just as much tragedy blended in with the happiness. He had lost good friends in pursuit of justice. Seen people he had loved die or become corrupted by the very evil he had sworn to fight. Despite it all he had done more good for the world than harm, of that he was sure. Every day The Green Arrow helped fight crime and corruption on all levels. Leaving that behind wasn’t something Oliver thought himself capable of.

He had been trying to. Rapidly approaching his forties, Oliver knew that he wouldn’t always be able to be The Green Arrow. He had tried to make a difference as Oliver Queen too.

Selling off Queen Industries had been his first port of call. The company held too much damage, too much that had been tainted by the sins of the Queen family. As useful as it had been having access to the company labs and research, it had ultimately meant more that Oliver gave it a chance to outgrow the shadows of his family. Oliver was glad to relinquish the company to Ray Palmer. The man was one of a handful of fringe members of The League, mostly only brought in to consult when they needed his expertise. The only other serious competing offer had been from LuthorCorp, and Oliver would have gladly given up his own life before handing the keys to his family company to Lex Luthor.

With the frankly absurd amount of money Palmer had paid for the company, Oliver had set up a number of charitable foundations across the city. Each of them catered to different needs, each one to a group of people that his city was failing. He had campaigned for prison reform, trying to get focus pushed onto rehabilitation over punishment. On top of that he had funded dozens of grassroots campaigns across the country, all of them trying in one way or another to help make the world a better place.

Still though, no matter how hard he tried to help there was something lacking in it. Being The Green Arrow was different, more tactile. Hood on his head and bow in hand Oliver would see first-hand the difference he could make. He was always in the thick of it, not just throwing money at the problem from his penthouse apartment.

“How did you end up in Star City?” He asked her after a long pause.

Kara shrugged her shoulders. “There was a train here at the right time.”

That sentiment hit frighteningly hard with Oliver. There had been a time when he had lost himself like that. Oliver had wandered the world for months after Roy Harper had been killed, unsure what his mission as a hero had meant if his friends were lost in the fighting. By chance alone he had stumbled onto an ashram in California and spent time with a holy man who had helped him to find his purpose and his soul. In Kara he could see all of the doubts and longing that he had remembered feeling back then. It had taken Oliver months to find his way back to the man that he had once been, to the man who came out the other end with a new mission and a different view of the world.

Could he give Kara what he had once been given?

“Kal-El said he’d find a cure.” Kara mumbled to herself after the silence dragged out again.

Oliver studied her carefully before answering. “You don’t believe him?”

“I don’t know who I am if I can’t help people,” Kara paused for a moment, eyes shut as if forcing back tears. “If he can’t cure me…”

The idea had been rattling around in the back of Oliver’s mind from the moment he had seen how defeated Kara was. She had spent her whole life on Earth being raised as a solider for The Justice League. The civilian life that she had was there only to give her cover, to integrate her with humanity just enough that she could understand them, but not mistake herself for one of them. It was something that Oliver saw happen with dozens of young recruits into The League. Without Supergirl, without the fight, she had nothing, she had no self.

It didn’t have to be the case. She could become more, something greater than superpowers directed in faux-righteous tones at the criminal element. It had been what happened to Oliver on Lian Yu, he had been made into something else, a weapon against the criminal and corrupt. But without the ideological justifications and rulebook that bound The Justice League.

It took more than just a need to help to become what Oliver had done. Roy, Mia, Dinah, Helena; everyone who had come to him had been broken by something first. They didn’t just need to help, they needed _his_ method. They needed to do something with the anger and fury that had consumed them. They needed something to make them whole again. Or, at least, something to distract them from the fact that they were broken.

Kara was right there. In that moment before the loss might consume her completely. The sadness at her loss, the anger at not having the only thing that made her who she was. It was the same thing Oliver had witnessed in every single one of his students.

He could do the same with her.

Or could he? Everyone else he had trained had been human, or close enough to. Dinah’s Canary Cry had never distanced her from her humanity. Kara was different. She wasn’t just someone who wanted to learn the way that Oliver had. She was Kryptonian, a whole different culture, a whole different planetary view to justice and fighting. More than that, she had been raised by The League from the moment she had arrived on Earth. They had been left with more than enough time to indoctrinate her into their way of thinking.

Even she agreed to let him train her, would she be able to overcome the way The League had taught her to think?

The League recruited children like a cult would. Brought them in during their adolescence and made them look down on the rest of humanity from their orbiting ivory tower. That kind of distance, that kind of insistence that they were the only people who had a right to protect humanity, and that anyone who refused them was the enemy, it was dangerous.

Unlike some of the others, Kara had the added weight of family. She and Superman were cousins, blood, and the last of their kind. To do things the way he did, Kara wouldn’t just have to betray the teachings of The League, she would have to betray her cousin. Oliver had no idea if the woman sat across from him was capable of that.

Still, there was a part of him that felt a pull. Something that Oliver couldn’t quite pin down was telling him to take the chance on her and make the offer. In a way, Oliver knew that it wouldn’t make a difference one way or the other, if she refused or accepted. She already knew who he was, where his base of operations was. Kara had the power to destroy him no matter what.

“Just because you don’t have your powers doesn’t mean you can’t help,” Oliver said. Kara’s attention lifted from staring morosely into her mug and she met his eyes. “I can train you. Teach you how to fight like I do.”

Despite the silence the fell between them, Kara didn’t avert her gaze from his eyes. He could see it all. The moment he posed the question he could see her processing it. There was a slight tilt in her neck, a glassy distance in her eyes that betrayed just how hard the proposition was for her to reconcile. Anyone who hadn’t been expecting the question to have weighed so heavily might have taken it as instant rejection, but Oliver knew better.

In spite of all the reasons he knew Kara might have had for turning him down, he knew something else. She _was_ Supergirl. League brainwashing or not, Superman’s cousin or not, Kara was something great. Even with the legally restricting kid gloves The League were taught to fight in Kara had shown something the rest of them never had. A level of ferocity, of rage, of righteous fury at the world and how horribly fractured it was.

That was something that Oliver could understand. As far as his information went, while Clark Kent had arrived on Earth as a baby, Kara had been in her early teens. She remembered her planet, remembered what it was she was losing. It was tangible for her, it meant something. Whereas Clark never knew the place he came from, Kara had truly lost her home. By some accounts, she had watched it get destroyed.

Loss on that scale was something even Oliver couldn’t comprehend. Even with all of his personal demons he had never encountered anything on that level. He could guess at what it might have done to her though. Going from that loss right into training to be a solider for The League, it would have damaged her even more. Regardless of all the propaganda and lies The League fed their indoctrinates, that kind of damage stood out.

He could use that. Oliver could tap into that unsolved rage and give Kara more.

If the steely determination building behind her eyes was any indication, she knew that too.

“Like you?”

He nodded, slowly, then waited a moment before speaking. “Without padded gloves. Without any limits. In the grime and the blood. Like a real warrior.”

The rage Oliver had seen in her fighting style was back in droves. The Kara that he had brought back to The Quiver, lost, frightened, alone, she had melted away. Supergirl was creeping in again. Everything about her shifted over a few long seconds. She stopped hunching, straightening in the chair. Her hands stopped gripping the mug for the remaining warmth that was petering out of the ceramic and balled into fists on the tabletop. Without breaking eye contact, Kara’s head raised up from the shallow angle it had taken.

He had been right. She was ready. If he trained her right, Kara could be greater than even him.

“Why?” She asked, voice almost iced over with the adrenaline soaked realisations she was no doubt coming to.

“Because I’ve seen that look in people before. You think you’ve lost your soul, who you are. You haven’t. I want to show you how to find it again.”

Kara’s gaze finally broke from the eye contact they had been locked into. For the briefest moment, her eyes drifted shut and Oliver wondered if it was some form of prayer.

“Okay,” She opened her eyes again. Everything he had wanted to see in her was right there, bared for the world to see. “Teach me.”

He shouldn’t, Oliver knew it, but all the years of his training couldn’t stop those two words from bringing a cold grin over his lips.

It wasn’t just about training her, giving her back the sense of self that she had lost along with her powers. There was more to it, something dark and deceitful. Something that Talia al Ghul would have lathered him with praises for knowing. Part of him knew that. The part that he didn’t want to fully acknowledge. Everyone he had taught, everything he had done in the years since he had first arrived on Lian Yu, it all would pale in comparison to showing one of The Justice League’s star examples of purity the truth of the world.

The idea flickered across his mind for a moment, a sickening glee at the idea clawing its way through him. The part of his mind that wanted to rejoice in the idea was the part he tried to keep locked down. It was the same part of him that had tortured General Shrieve in Hong Kong, Kovar’s men in Russia, the part that enjoyed it. The part of him that thrilled at the feeling of warm blood on his hands. The part of him that wanted Supergirl to be his, not The League’s.

Oliver grabbed at it, crushing down the impulse with everything he had in him. He couldn’t train her thinking like that. The monster wasn’t him, it didn’t have control.

“We start at dawn,” Oliver could hear the harshness in his own voice. Anger more at the dark parts of his own mind than anything else. He crossed the room, finding the lockbox where he kept spare keys to the various safehouses he maintained.

“Here.” With no other warning he threw the keys across to her.

The shot was wide, intentionally so. Not far enough that she would have to get up to catch them, but off enough that she would have to react. Kara’s left arm shot out and snatched them out of the air.

She was already good.

The training wouldn’t phase her, he could see it already. If nothing else, Kara knew how to take a beating, and that put her one rung up on some of the people he had taught. There was still so much for him to teach her.

“The address is on the chain,” He continued when Kara looked him curiously. “Go there, sleep. Do whatever it is you need to do to get ready. Tomorrow, I break you down and start from the ground up.”

He didn’t need to make her afraid, she was determined enough that Oliver had little doubt it would have any effect on her. The mind was where the truth of the fight was carried. The League just taught people how to rely on their powers to win a fight, not how to turn their body into a weapon. They taught the reasons why to hold back, not the reasons to let go. They taught unity in strength, not that trusting anyone else was lethal.

The truth of the fight was in the mind.

In Kara more than anyone he had ever trained, Oliver needed to pick apart years of indoctrination from The League and rebuild Kara in the right way.

Kara must have sense the finality in his voice. Without even so much as looking as though she wanted to reply, Kara rose to her feet and made for the elevator doors. As they slid open and she stepped inside, Oliver spoke.

“If I so much as smell a cape in my city, you’re done.”

His voice was even colder than it had been, and Oliver had made a point of not turning to face her. His back had been firmly facing the elevator when she had stepped in.

Another of his deductions of her rang true again as Kara remained wordless while the elevator doors snapped shut.


	3. Chapter 3

Training Kara had been every bit the challenge Oliver had hoped for.

She was fierce, determined, built to withstand more than the usual measures Oliver employed. The loss she had been through, the destruction of her whole world and holding onto that level of survivors guilt her whole life, had made her insensitive in ways Oliver hadn’t fully anticipated. Cracking open her bedrock exterior to pick apart the lies and propaganda The League and her cousin had force fed her had proved far more challenging than he had thought.

In some people, it took little more than repeated beatdowns given under the guise of sparing to crack the surface. Others took more focus, sensory deprivation or isolation, insults or attacks based on their history, or a combination of it all. The psychological affecting them more than the physical. Some needed both. A vicious left hook and a barbed comment about them, or their family. Something to make them snap, to make them acknowledge the anger they were burning with.

Oliver knew fully well the kind of people he trained. Those who came to him came already broken, already damaged in ways that would never be fixed by most accounts. Never once did he make promises of fixing people, that wasn’t what Oliver did. He didn’t give them back their innocence, their belief that the world was good and that people were driven by more than just base, selfish desire. What he did do was show them everything else, the bitter darkness that ran the course of humanity. Then, when they knew it as well as they knew themselves, he built them back up to fight it.

He didn’t fix people. No. He took the damaged and broken souls that came to him and showed them how to use the fractures within them to do good. Or, at the very least, if not good then justice. Justice of a kind.

It was the kind that Clark Kent and his cohorts looked down upon. The kind that they thought was somehow less just because it didn’t fit into the petty constraints that corrupt groups of power hungry tyrants imposed on those beneath them. The only set of laws Oliver held to as gospel were those of physics. Everything else was more than just blank, they were never to be written.

Getting Kara to see that had been challenging. Unlike some of the others, she knew darkness. She had seen evil since the day her parents had stuffed her in a pod bound for Earth alongside a baby she was supposed to care for. She had known evil intimately as she watched her whole world collapse in on itself because the ruling classes refused to acknowledge that they were anything less than perfect. She had fought evil, in many ways, as Supergirl.

With The Justice League, it had always been sanitised evil. Killer robots, world ending threats, monstrous invading armies, everything nice and clean. They never got down into the mud like Oliver had. They didn’t have to trapse through blood and filth at the very base levels of human degradation. Oliver highly doubted Superman had ever been at the Port of Starling and opened a shipping container to see dozens of rotting corpses that had died clambering over each other for a gulp fresh air. Or that Wonder Woman had been forced to analyse the dead body of a teenage girl to try and find the animal that had ripped her apart.

They rose above it. They let the governments of the world push them back and away into their orbiting space station because they didn’t want to deal with the filth.

That had been how he got through to Kara.

The Triad had been the longest standing war Oliver had been waging. For every branch of their operations he severed, they built another. For every corrupt cop he ventilated they bribed two more. For every piece of shit rapist whose throat he shoved an arrow though, they hired another dozen. The latest thread of their operations he had been working to tear apart was their brothels, and by extension their people smuggling ring. The evidence was there, enough for him to see but not enough for the authorities to do anything about. The Triad were smuggling young women into the country and sending them to work in brothels. Not just in Star City but across the West Coast.

It took Oliver showing Kara the crime scene photos of what happened to the girls who stopped earning for her to really see it. Then, she had followed his training without pause, without question. He gave an order and she followed. The League, for all their faults, had made her quite the solider.

She took his mission on as her own. That had been the reason he chose the Triad to focus on with her. The depth of corruption in Star City ran deeper than the Chinese mob, but Oliver had needed something that would resonate with Kara. She was hardly into her twenties, objectively speaking. A decade younger than Oliver himself. He knew she would see it. That she would look at the mangled corpse of a woman no younger than herself and take it to heart.

It had been a callous move, Oliver knew that. Perhaps more so than his usual tactics, he had driven high her anger at losing her powers and picked the target that she could have easily herself become the victim of. It had worked. She was willing to learn, ready to train his way. And that, Oliver told himself, would have to be enough.

Picking away at The League’s training had taken longer still. Maybe more so because it had been Superman himself, the cousin she had been sent to Earth to protect, who had taught it to her personally. Once they got started, she began to see it though. The futility of fighting with one hand tied behind her back.

Lethal force was rarely Oliver’s first call. In spite of all his anger, the need he felt to make sure those who deserved it saw their punishment, he knew some people were capable of being reformed. There were lines for him, some types of people that Oliver would kill without hesitation, others that he would let live. Kara understood that concept quickly, and it left Oliver wondering if it had been because of some inherent difference in the way that Krypton looked at the value of life. Kara had never taken a life with her own hands, never come close, but still she understood that sometimes there was no other way.

The part of him that had thrilled at the idea of getting to rebuild Supergirl snarled greedily in the dark recesses of his mind as it wondered how far Oliver could push her. If there would be a scenario in which she could kill. If he could be the one to make her do it.

Over and over Oliver refused to give the voice room to shape his actions. He crushed it down with practiced will every time it crawled up out of the darkness, and tried to focus on the good.

More than just running him into an early grave, Oliver knew what wearing the hood meant. It meant drawing on the darkness. For all the good he did, every time he drew back his bow Oliver drew on the darkness within him. For every charitable foundation he set up as Oliver Queen, he took a dozen chunks out of his soul as The Green Arrow. From the very beginning Oliver had known it would happen. Talia explicitly told it to him, Anatoly warned him the danger of trying to live two lives, Slade had laughed at his insentience on trying to be more than the killer.

Training Kara brought it up in ways he hadn’t expected. It gave the monster more and more ground with him. Regardless of The League’s training, Kara had stayed hopeful at heart. She had believed in the goodness within all people, that everyone was worthy of redemption. Oliver hadn’t just stolen her of that hope, he had crushed it into a fine dust and set it on fire right in front of her. And part of him had been thrilled at the look of hopelessness in her eyes.

The impulse wasn’t one he was proud of, and he had buried it with the rest of the parts of himself that shamed him.

Teaching her to fight had been different, altogether easier than anyone he had taught before. Oliver had always been forced to teach his students how to build their strength, how to control it, before they could so much as hold a bow. Mia took months to learn how to draw a bow properly, and weeks more to aim with the kind of accuracy she needed in the field. Even Roy who had come to him after years of fighting on the streets had taken weeks of training to understand the principle.

It had taken Kara three days.

Three almost mundane days of teaching until Kara could hit a perfect bullseye in any scenario Oliver threw at her. Falling from a building, blindfolded, springing out of a front roll. She didn’t fail. Kara was perfect. So willing to learn and effortless in her execution. None of his students had come close to performing the way she had.

There was something about watching her, the way she handled a bow as though she had always been destined to do so, the effortless grace in her skill, the righteous fury that seemed to radiate from Kara every time they trained. There was so much to her, so much more than the clean cut, all-American Supergirl that the public got to see. Astronomical units more than the tepid niceness of Kara Kent. Oliver had sensed it within her in those moments before offering to train her, had tasted it in the air every moment they had spent together since.

He had admired that in her, yes. Respected the hidden, crackling fire inside her that Kara had tried so hard to keep buried. Looked with thrilled anticipation at the warrior she could become with the right guiding hand, the force for real justice Kara had the potential to be if she could get over the bastardised vision of The League.

Something had started to change though. The respect and anticipation had blended into something else as Oliver watched her grow. With every bullseye, every dirty trick of his that she learnt to counter, every step she took towards his side of the fence, he felt it. Pulling, pulsing, buried and still screaming for attention.

Kara was an attractive woman, Oliver had no qualms admitting it. On the surface alone, even with the unflattering and deliberately neutral dressings of Kara Kent her physical beauty was undeniable. He had noticed it on their very first meeting in the alley. Once she had shed those initial habits, a different woman had emerged. The formfitting outfits they trained in were one thing, but Kara had changed beyond that. Gone were the pastel colours and unflattering wardrobe choices. In what limited downtime Oliver allowed them both, and the even more limited time they spent together outside of training, Kara picked out figure hugging jeans, tops that elegantly displayed the chiselled features of her shoulders and biceps. She knew how to draw out a frighteningly attractive balance of feminine curves and built definition, in a way that turned Oliver’s head less infrequently than he would have liked. The first time he had seen her like that it became all the more obvious that Kara Kent wasn’t her at all, that everything about her had been created by her cousin.

More than just the change in her wardrobe, her fire had risen. Oliver had stoked it, he knew that. He chose the Triad case to focus on with her to bait her empathy and use her grief at losing her powers to turn it into anger. Then the training regime on top forced more and more of the habits and personality her cousin had taught her to break away. The thin crust of Clark Kent’s training collapsed. Oliver, all of him and not just the dark parts, had thrilled at being right about her. The walls that she had built, the Kara Kent she had become broke down and burnt away. Kara Zor-El had always been hidden under the surface, begging to be truly set free.

After the first two weeks the woman he trained with was almost wholly different from the one he had met. Her personality was almost entirely different, in ways that sometimes defied accurate description.

That did nothing to quell that feeling of attraction Oliver had felt volleying between them in training sessions. The physical alone had been bad enough, but Oliver had spent enough time around beautiful women in his reckless youth that he could control himself impeccably around that alone. Once he tapped into the real Kara though, once he brought out the warrior he had always suspected lurked underneath the Supergirl façade, it became more difficult to shut down.

The way she kept pace with his training, her quick and elegant mastery of a bow, the raw aggression behind each punch she threw. All of that was enough to lick the flames of the physical attraction Oliver felt for her. In their training sessions there were moments, where the two of them would get too close, lips inches apart, hands accidently brushing against sensitive flesh in attack and counterattack patterns. Too often did Oliver have Kara pinned and their faces would be increments too close for it to be platonic. From the way she reacted to him, Kara felt it too.

It was dangerous, Oliver knew that far too well. Helena had been the only time he had truly given into his attraction to a student, and he had let that attraction blind him to who she really had been. After that, Oliver had vowed never to make the mistake again, and he hadn’t. With Mia it had been easy to lock down, her objective physical beauty aside, she had always been more of a little sister to him. With Dinah, there was enough lingering guilt around Tommy that Oliver had been completely able to disassociate himself with the lingering attraction there had been between them.

Kara tugged at him differently. A way that collided violently with the walls Oliver had spent so long erecting.

Beyond the training though, they fought.

In every lesson on fighting, or detective work, or the nuances of the criminal element, Kara listened. More than that, she _learnt_. She took things on board, rolled with the concepts of his training, and expanded on his ideas in ways Oliver hadn’t anticipated. But outside of that, they clashed on one thing. The one thing that Oliver had known, from the second he considered offering to train her, would come up:

The Justice League.

Weaponry, the government, lethal force; not once did Kara argue back against Oliver’s lessons. Even when he taught her about the most extreme scenarios, the worst possibilities, she understood. At the very least Kara engaged with him on a philosophical standpoint, if not always a literal one.

The Justice League was outside it all.

Oliver had never attempted to keep his distaste for them a secret, nor did he advertise it, but every lesson he taught Kara had a purpose.

With the amount of time he had been fighting his crusade, Oliver knew that his beliefs in the mission and his politics had become blurred at some point. At the beginning there had been clear lines. The Green Arrow and Oliver Queen had been distinct. The longer he fought for the mission, the more those lines blurred. Oliver Queen had ceased to be just a mask for the mission and instead had become another outlet for it. He used his money and influence to advocate for change in a way The Green Arrow never could. Oliver didn’t delude himself. He knew he was human, that he had biases. That, as much as he wished it, he couldn’t look at the world for a purely objective standpoint. His experiences, the loses he had suffered, and the things he had seen, they affected him on all levels of his life.

Ever aware of his own failings, Oliver kept his beliefs as detached as possible from the lessons he taught. He had disagreed on politics with many of his students, Mia and Dinah most of all. But that had never affected his ability to teach them. The skills they needed for the mission didn’t totally overlap with the way he looked at the world. There was enough room in the grey areas sometimes.

That said, The League had never come up before. Dinah had been the closest, and only then because of her Canary Cry. As a meta-human, she was more likely to find her way onto The League’s radar than he was once she went solo. Even with her power, she had been sceptical of them. Not hateful as Oliver was, but she had reservations. She saw the bureaucracy that held them back, though in a different way. Where Oliver saw the strings that corrupt politicians could use to manipulate the deadliest threats on planet Earth, Dinah, ever the lawyer, saw flaws in a system that could be fixed.

When it came to The League, Kara wasn’t in a different ballpark. She was in a whole other continent.

Oliver was not above creating arguments with Kara, with any of his students, in order to promote tension, to get them to fight harder. It was a tactic he had employed often. Negative reinforcement, breeding conflict, in training they worked as tactics. From experience Oliver knew it wasn’t enough to just give his students combat skills. They needed a level of scepticism, a level of knowing that the world was against them. When that was his goal, he picked his arguments, situations he knew he was playing ‘Devil’s Advocate’ for alone.

With Kara, The League was different. No matter how much he tried to avoid the topic, it always seemed as though they ended up there. Multitasking was par for the course when it came to training. Oliver counterposed sparing with more nuanced lessons. He would quote Socrates at the same time as delivering a leg sweep, Nietzsche while teaching ecrisma, Marx as he demonstrated bow work. Everything in balance.

The lessons he taught in combat, sparring sessions, Oliver always saw them more as a dance than as a fight. It was why he sought to counterpoint them with philosophy and politics. That was always done as a lesson, explaining the philosophical while teaching the physical.

Though with Kara, the dance of combat training often turned into the aggression of a fight.

Try as he might, Oliver couldn’t stop them from ending up discussing The League. Every discussion of politics, philosophy, anything; they always found themselves back at the same point. It drove them both to anger.

Uncompromising.

It was one of the first things Oliver had noticed about her. Kara wasn’t willing to give an inch, and neither was he. When it came to The League, the very thing that her cousin had founded, that had been her pseudo-family her whole time on Earth, taught her everything she knew, Kara was even less relenting than usual. Oliver refused to give any ground either, he had seen first-hand the damage that The League had caused. The problems that they exemplified.

“The Justice League is not a cult!” Kara bit the words out, teeth bared, and steered Oliver’s left jab wide.

The topic of cults hadn’t been a direct spear thrown at The League. Cult mentality came up more frequently that Oliver had thought possible when he first donned his hood. In the time he had been back in Star City, he had come up against three distinctly identifiable cults, not to mention the times he had gone up against The League of Assassins. The techniques cults used to manipulate people came up even more often. The Triad used similar methods on some of the women and girls they forced into working for them, the point of the lesson was to educate Kara on their enemy. All it took was Oliver making a remark on cults who brought in children for Kara to snap.

“That’s not what it looks like to me.”

Oliver couldn’t stop himself from rising to it. He should have let it slide, concede the point and focus on the lesson. It would have been easier to brush it aside, to tell her that he hadn’t been trying to attack The League. There would have been enough truth in for her to believe him, and it wouldn’t really need a lie from him. But he couldn’t. Every time they disagreed on The League Oliver found himself drawn into the argument, his own fury rising just as Kara’s did. They were locked into the routine, orbiting each other in a way neither could pin down.

“They take children. With powers, with gifts, and they train them into soldiers,” Oliver continued. “Sounds like a cult to me.”

“That isn’t true.”

Kara launched forward and wove a series of potentially lethal blows at Oliver. In any other sparring session, Oliver would have done little more than deflect them and push Kara back, but he didn’t. Kara swung out a right handed strike, Oliver caught it, locked out her arm and snapped a flat-palm into her sternum. She staggered back a dozen paces, Oliver releasing her arm to allow the movement.

“Footwork.” Oliver snapped the word out, and they both began to circle. Perfectly synchronised.

“The League protects the kids they take in.” Kara’s words were more measured that time.

Oliver grinned a little. “Snatching orphans from the streets, stealing children away from their parents. Sounds so magnanimous.”

He loathed that they did it. Of all the things The League did, the children was what fuelled his hatred the most. Orphans, alone and lost, sometimes that made sense. Children with powers, aliens, they would have been shunned by most people on Earth. Oliver had no disillusions about the cruelty of mankind. But instead of finding them good homes, places where they would more than likely learn to use their natural abilities for mundane things, they were shipped to The Watchtower and trained up. Then there were the kids like Tim Drake, or Wally West, who had parents waiting at home. Parents either tortured with the knowledge that every time their child left the house they might never come home alive, or blind to the double life that they led. The League raised children into soldiers, manipulated them into risking their lives when it was the last thing they should have been doing.

“The League never takes anyone in against their will.” Kara argued, and closed the gap between them by a step.

“And who would dare refuse when Superman turns up at your front door making demands.” Before Kara could offer up a counter, Oliver continued. “They take children away to a satellite orbiting the Earth, disconnect them from humanity and turn them into weapons of mass destruction.”

“The League trains them to control their powers, to use their powers for good.” Kara took another step closer.

Oliver wasn’t sure if Kara had done it on purpose, but every time she had referred to The League, she had never included herself. It wasn’t ‘ _we_ ’, it was ‘ _they_ ’.

“You can’t judge them, you’ve trained soldiers too.” Kara berated.

In their time together, Oliver told Kara a little more about his life as The Green Arrow. She had seen the mementos of his students that he kept in The Quiver; photos of him with Dinah and Tommy, the video Mia had left him when she had decided to strike out on her own, the shattered crossbow he took when he had handed Helena to the police, the tattered shreds of Roy Harper’s armour. She asked for the stories behind those mementos and Oliver offered her just enough truth to sate her curiosity.

“Never children,” Oliver snarled, the casual way she has compared him to The League poured gasoline onto the fire of the anger he had been trying to stop from spiralling. “ _Never_ children.” 

The rest of his thin control fractured. Oliver stepped into Kara’s space, slamming a shoulder into her at chest height as he ducked low under punch. She rebounded quicker than Oliver expected and rabbit-punched him in the back before he could straighten up again. The pain of the blow washed out over the anger that had taken control his combat sense, and Oliver wove his counterattack. Kara went for another left-handed jab but Oliver saw the move coming. He batted the attack aside with a wing block and closed what little distance had opened up between them again. Oliver tangled one of his legs in with hers, pressed his weight forward and took Kara off balance. She stumbled, lost her footing, and went down hard onto the mat. The breath soared out of her lungs audibly.

There was a long silence, punctuated only by their heavy breaths. When Oliver turned and bent to help her up, she was already rising toward him. Their hands were on each other before either of them fully realised what was happening.

It was like resolution. The circling hostility between them collapsed inward, the release like a streak of fire through their nerves. They were both trying to kiss each other and laugh at the same time. Kara made excited little panting sounds as Oliver’s hands brushed along her abdomen, the heat of her skin burning against his palms even through the material of the training top. Almost unconsciously, Oliver moved them until Kara’s back was flush against one of the reinforced concrete pillars that ran along the training space.

Her top came off, jerked insistently free by eager hands desperate to get back to more tactile actions. Oliver shed his own shirt in one, and his hands returned to her skin, palms skidding over coarse nipples and breasts that fitted into his hands as though they had been designed to nestle there. Kara’s own hands kept alternating between fisting in his hair to pull him closer into her lips, and raking nails up and down his spine. Both actions drove him on, heat rising in ways he hadn’t felt in too long. Kara’s hands dropped down to his hips, frantically tugging at the waist of his trousers and sliding one long fingered hand into the gap. Oliver felt the calluses that had begun to form on the base of each finger, rubbing.

Oliver’s lips parted in a muted gasp for a moment and Kara’s mouth leapt forward to meet his lips again. The kiss was almost feral, all teeth and soundless fury. His hands dropped from her breasts, grabbed the waistband of her skin tight training shorts, and pulled them down to mid-thigh. Kara did the rest, a fractional shake of her hips and legs to drop the material down the rest of the way and the toes of one foot flicking the fabric across the room.

In a different world, one where they had both been normal, Oliver would have dropped to his knees then. Glady spent hours between her legs revelling in all the different noises he could draw out of her with just his tongue and fingers.

It wasn’t what either of them wanted. Not what they needed.

Kara hitched Oliver’s trousers down enough to free him from the tight fabric, and he lifted her up off the ground. Oliver didn’t understand the feeling that flooded through him, put it down to the overdrive of hormones, because he felt like a man coming home. Strong legs wrapped around his waist and Oliver watched himself slide into her up to the hilt, with a gasp because she was burning. She was burning inside, gripping him with the liquid entirety of hot bath water. Kara lifted and wove like a snake, and her hair cascaded down from her bent head in a chaotic elegance. Oliver’s lips locked with her own, and he felt more than heard a moan rake through her. One hand was locked under the heated globes of her buttocks, holding her up, the other reached forward to cup her breasts, then the breadth of her ribs, the definition of her shoulders, and all the while she lifted and yawed like the ocean around a ship. 

Oliver felt the first climax go through her, but it was the sight of her looking back at him, through the tumbled hair, lips parted, that slipped the final catches on his own control and moulded him against her front, hands gripping her ass until his spasms were all spent inside her. With care belonging to a much less orgasm-weary man, Oliver took them both to the floor until he was lying flat with Kara still astride him. Then, he felt himself slide out of her. He thought she was still coming.

Neither of them said anything for a long time. Both laid flat against the cool vinyl of the training mats, heavy breaths filling the room. 

Oliver slid an arm around Kara’s flank and tilted her gently to one side, so that they laid together like spoons.

“Where are we going?” She asked gently.

Oliver felt the tendrils of a smile curl on his lips. “That’s a little philosophical, like asking me to acknowledge my own existential dread.”

Against the odds, it brought a laugh out of her. She turned fully to face Oliver. Kara’s hands rose to touch his face softly, as if she thought it might mark easily, or maybe disappear.

“Conscious thought doesn’t have much to do with most of this stuff,” Oliver offered, as though he could explain away what had just happened between. “Doesn’t have much to do with the way most people live their lives full stop. A bit of rationalisation, most of it with hindsight. Put the rest down to hormonal drives.”

Her finger followed a line down the side of his face. “I think it’s sad that you see the world like that.”

“Kara,” Oliver took hold of her finger and squeezed gently. “You are a real fucking Luddite, aren’t you?”

She shrugged. “Krypton wasn’t like here. Sex for pleasure…well it wasn’t something to be discussed. And kids, we had the birthing matrix for that. It’s liberating, being able to choose.”

It wasn’t often Kara offered up information about Krypton. Everything Oliver knew about the planet came from Lois Lane’s published interviews with Superman (something Oliver thought was hilarious coming from a reporter who loved to bawl people out for lacking integrity, all of her best stories involved her husband), or archives from STAR Labs that Overwatch had hacked into for him. Hearing about a whole different civilisation first hand was endlessly fascinating to him.

Oliver reached across the plain of her abdomen, and slid his hand along the length of thigh to her knee, levering her gently over and bringing his mouth to kiss gently at the shaved bar of hair where it descended into cleft. Kara resisted fractionally at first, maybe thinking on their animosity, or maybe just their mingled juices trickling from her body. Then she relented and spread herself under him. Oliver shifted her other thigh up over his shoulder and lowered his face onto her.

The second time she came, it was with escalating cries that she locked in her throat each time with powerful flexing of the muscles at the base of her stomach. Her whole body writhed back and forth across the bed and her hips bucked upward, grinding into the soft flesh of his mouth. At some point, she lapsed into uttered Kryptonese, whose tones stoked Oliver’s own arousal. When she finally flopped into stillness, Oliver was able to slide up into her directly, gathering her under his the arms and sinking his tongue into her mouth in the first kiss they had shared since hitting the mat.

They moved slowly, trying for languid relaxation and the laughter of their first embrace. It seemed to last a long time, time for talking, up the scale from languid murmurs to excited gabbling, for shifts in posture and soft biting, the clasping of hands, and all the time a feeling of brimming to overflow that hurt Oliver’s eyes. It was from that last, unbearable pressure as much as any that Oliver finally let go and came into her, feeling her chase the last of his fading hardness with her own shaking finish.

As they separated for the second time, the weight of everything they had done came down over them both like a heavy blanket and consciousness slipped gradually away from them in the increasing warmth. Oliver’s last clear impression was of the body beside him rearranging itself with breasts pressed into his back, an arm draped over him, and a peculiarly comfortable clasping of feet, his in hers, like hands.

Oliver felt his thought processes slowing down. 


	4. Chapter 4

The shift between them had gone unspoken. Even the agreement to do so had been nonverbal. Kara had woken the morning after the first time to find Oliver gone. Not knowing what exactly to do, she had gone about her day as usual until returning to The Quiver that afternoon for her training session. Oliver had, as always, been there before her and things had continued as normal.

Until they didn’t.

The collapse into the same mutual gravity that they had felt when they had locked lips for the first time had returned with a vengeance in every moment they spent together. Both of them had known it was there. Both of them had tried to deny it. From the moment they had given in to it the first time, the moment they had crossed into _something_ that wasn’t just mentor and student, there had been no going back. Call it fate, karma, the hand of God. Both of them knew that the change showed more. Meant more. _Was_ more. Than either of them wanted to acknowledge.

In the moment, that first time, it had been about need.

Kara was powerless for the first meaningful time in her adult life, she could let go and be with someone without having to concentrate on all the nuances of her body to stop herself from accidentally crushing her lover. She had never seen the chance before, certainly not with a man who knew all of her. And Oliver did. There wasn’t a part of her that was hidden from him, and it had been too easy for her to give in.

Oliver had been alone for far too long. He had trained Roy, then Mia, Helena, and Dinah. After Helena’s dive from sanity and Dinah joining The League, Oliver had resigned himself to isolation. As Oliver Queen, he had slept with a number of women after that, but it had never been more than surface level. Then Kara had been there, a woman who knew the truth of who had was, or at least as much as he was willing to give, and it had been too easy for him to give in.

That first moment had been easy to write off. They had been angry. At each other, at the world, at everything that had destroyed their lives over and over and lead them both to that moment. Sweaty from the fight, exhausted from the philosophy, ready and eager for something as simple as sex. So they had given in. Abandoned all the things that told them it was a terrible idea to sleep together and surrendered to pleasure and want.

Then they had sunk down to the training mat. Instead of moving on there and then, like both of them knew they should have done, they stayed. Oliver had held her close and Kara had spoken of her home. When talking had seemed too much, Oliver had buried his lips between her legs and eked out pleasures that Kara hadn’t known herself capable of feeling. They had both fucked into a state of pure euphoria, and fallen asleep cuddled together. In the moment, it had felt right, like themselves against the whole of reality.

The next morning Oliver had run.

All the denial he had tried to talk himself into was futile. Helena had taught him that getting involved with a student would only lead to more harm than good, and so he had committed to stay detached. There was a difference, Oliver knew, between sex and emotion. They were two different processes and he _could_ keep them separate. So, in his mind, he resigned what had happened between himself and Kara into the realm of the physical, never to touch the emotional. He could lock down the attraction between them before it had the opportunity to spiral into anything deeper. Anything that could compromise the mission or Kara’s training.

His resolve had held for all of a week.

That was all it took before he found himself and Kara entangled in a mess of limbs on the training room floor. It hadn’t been intentional, just another argument that had spiralled until he had Kara pinned against the mat, biting out a spiteful comment aimed at The League. Then Kara had jumped upward and kissed him.

Quite how it happened, neither of them were entirely certain, but it became a habit. They would train as usual, Oliver’s brutal regime of combat skills and philosophy taught as one, and towards the end of nearly every session they would fall into each other’s arms. After a week it became almost reflex and they stopped trying to fight it. They both decided to let it happen. It was easy, in far too many ways. The anger, the tension, the release, it all felt good. An invisible gravity drawing them together time and again beyond either of their abilities to comprehend.

They both marked it down as physical. It remained unspoken between them, no matter how many times it happened. Kara hadn’t been running away from her life to find an easy fuck, and Oliver hadn’t invited her to train under him as a guise to get her into his bed. They both marked the sex down as convenience, a way to vent all the stress of their lives, guilt free with someone who understood. It didn’t mean anything more to either of them, it _couldn’t_ mean anything more to either of them. But that didn’t change the fact that they both felt that the gravity between them was more than just skin deep.

Their conscious minds refused to accept it, but in many ways both of them could sense the deeper pull that ran between them. In the moments of the afterglow, when they held each other a little bit too close for their insistence there was nothing deeper between them, they felt it. The fizzling static of potential. Whining like energy through high voltage cables and begging to be let loose. They both buried it deep. Neither wanted it. Neither wanted to admit that there could be anything more.

Oliver was locked into the mission. He was a man who had long ago accepted that he was destined to die alone. More than likely at the hands of a criminal he would be trying to stop. Even with all of his efforts as Oliver Queen to improve Star City to a point where it would no longer need The Green Arrow, he had known since the moment he had arrived on Lian Yu that he would never live to see old age. He had come to terms with it. Dying alone, dying for the mission, it made sense. His city needed him, and he would give himself to it until he had nothing left to give. There was no room for him to feel another commitment, one that might mean more than the mission.

Kara was a woman lost. Supergirl or not, able to fight the criminal and corrupt or not, she had lost her whole world. There was no coming back from that. She was the last true survivor of Krypton. Yes, Kal-El had made it to Earth. Yes, he had tried to carry on Krypton’s legacy through what he had learnt through Jor-El’s data crystals. No, he wasn’t a true Kryptonian. Kara was the last of her line. The last daughter of The House of El, the last person who remembered that doomed planet which had orbited a dying red star. Giving herself to a human, emotionally, and to the point where she could consider a _life_ was a fallacy. She could never become anything more than she was; a living codex of Kryptonian history.

So, they both buried what emotional substance there was between them. Though it changed nothing. All the compartmentalisation, all the wilful ignorance. It did nothing to stop them from finding themselves collapsing into each other at frequencies that alarmed them both. Against their wills it had become common. Become habit. Become _comfortable_. What had started as a one off outlet to vent their tensions, as simple and easy sexual release had become something else. The moment it had happened for a second time they had both known, and consciously suppressed, that knowledge.

Instead they had trained. The first lessons that Oliver taught, Kara had exceeded at. Handling a bow, basic combat, investigative work, Kara had absorbed it all with ease. Oliver had been impressed, more so than he had been with any other student. Even Roy, his first pupil, his surrogate son, and the man who had understood the mission perhaps better than any other had taken months to learn what Kara had in weeks.

Which let Oliver turn to the more important lessons. Kara could draw a bow, fight with elegance, and pick apart a crime scene like a detective, but none of that came close to the standard Oliver held himself to. Everything that he had taught her up until the point they had started to sleep together had been the surface. Maybe he had chosen to accelerate her training beyond his usual regime because of that, to give them both something else to focus on, but it had made little difference. Kara’s indomitable determination had seen to it.

Oliver had walked her through the speciality arrows that he used, each with a specific purpose. Stunner arrows, to divert and disable. Acidic, to weaken structures and breach covertly. Bola, to secure and subdue. And every other tool in his arsenal. Kara had diligently studied the use of all of them, asked focused questions about their deployment – how to know what arrows to pack for any given scenario. Every situation Oliver had thrown at her after that explanation, Kara had been meticulous in her response, in the arrows and weapons she suggested.

Then, he had given her the philosophy that had kept him alive. That had kept him grounded:

“These are just tools. Rely on them too much and they become a crutch.”

For a time, Oliver had abandoned all of his trick arrows. Instead, all he had used had been the traditional broadhead. After Mia had struck out on her own, Dinah had joined The League, Helena had been arrested, and Roy had died, Oliver had needed to go back to his roots. For almost a year he had used nothing but broadhead arrows. He had needed to prove to himself that it was _him_ not his tools that got the mission done. That had been when he developed his philosophy towards speciality arrows. They were part of his arsenal, but not a part of him. He could do the job with or without them. On any given night, he could go out into the field and serve the mission with a quiver full of broadhead arrows as well as he could with a quiver packed with speciality arrows. The tricks arrows were there to help him, not to control him. They were tools to help him get out of a fight, or to end one quickly. Not an alternative to getting into the mud and the blood. Of all things, Oliver refused to let himself get distanced from the fight. That had been The Justice League’s mortal sin. They had allowed themselves to become detached from the very base of human degradation, the very thing that created the injustice they had sworn to fight. Keeping everything he did tangible was as central to the mission as anything else.

It had taken a little time to get that across to Kara. To her, with her training, it made sense to rely on tools as she once had done with her powers. Oliver hadn’t taught her the lesson himself, not directly. Instead he had given her homework. _Earth Abides._ He had been forced to dig the novel out from under a pile of other, dusty tomes. He hadn’t read it in years, but the words danced around in his mind as he had searched for it as thought he had only read it the day before. Kara had finished the whole book in little over an afternoon. The training session that evening, they had discussed the ideas as they had sparred, and for once they didn’t descend into fighting over The League. They had talked of the philosophy of reducing human society to the fundamentals, about the tangible connection to nature and simplicity that came when one stripped away the claustrophobic tentacles of modernity.

And like that, Kara had understood it, in a way that none of his students before her ever could have done. More than anyone else, Kara had known what it felt like to be above that visceral sense of the mission. As Supergirl, a member of The Justice League, she had stayed totally disconnected from the human race. Her only meaningful human attachments were Martha and Jonathan Kent, the people who had raised Superman. The “friends” she had made following her cousin into journalism hardly counted for anything. _Clark_ had allowed her only enough time around humanity for her to be confused by their contradictions and nuances. Oliver’s first instinct had been to think Clark had done it on purpose, had left Kara slightly out of touch with humanity in order to make her a better soldier for The League. Then, as Kara had begun to tell him about her history one day, he had realised that Clark was just oblivious. To Oliver, it was clear that Clark had thought he was helping his cousin out by giving her time amongst humanity, but in the end it had done more harm than good. Clark’s paranoia that Kara would be found out had resulted in her not spending any meaningful time in the company of humans. So, not only had Kara not been given time to integrate properly with them, she had been left with more questions than answers about humanity. Those questions that she had been left with had been answered by the members of the Justice League. People who lived aboard The Watchtower, ever distant, and looking down on humanity through windows into hard space. That kind of distance was something Oliver hoped he would never be able to contextualise.

On occasion, Oliver’s mind would wander back to that first time with Kara. Before they had collapsed into the training mat, before his anger had truly flared, Kara had compared him to The League. In the moment, he had been driven to such anger by the comment that he hadn’t really considered it. All he had thought about was how much he loathed the _heroes_ the lived aboard The Watchtower and the corrupt, self-serving ideology they represented. The children. The thought of it drove a sickening numbness through him every time.

Mia was the closest he’d ever come to training a child, and even then it wasn’t the same. He had taken the lost teenager under his wing when she had been just sixteen, he hadn’t even met Roy then, only a year back from The Island. But Oliver Queen had been the one to take in Mia. He got her papers to become an emancipated minor, she got into school, she worked at Queen Industries, Oliver just gave her the tools to help herself. It didn’t take her long to figure out Oliver was The Green Arrow. He had been in the middle of training Roy when she told him she knew the truth, demanding that he train her as well. He had kept her at arm’s length, already cautious about training Roy and with no desire to drag a minor into the war. It was two years later, on the coattails of her HIV diagnosis at age nineteen that he finally agreed to give her his world.

He trained soldiers, that much was true. He didn’t train them for an army. With The League, it was about adding number after number to their ranks, to shore up what little power and autonomy they still held onto. To Oliver, he trained his students into soldiers because it was what they had needed. They needed to be hardened to the world, to view it through the haze of scepticism and shades of grey that Oliver had learnt to. He made them more than they were, into warriors that could protect those who needed protecting. Not every trait he instilled in his students was inherently good, he knew that. Not for a moment did Oliver feign to be above the knowledge the ultimately his soul was as dark as the people he fought. It came down to math. Oliver might have traded away his soul, the parts of him that were good, but he had done it to save lives. On the whole, he was a force for good, even if he himself was anything but _good._

_“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster, when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you.”_

Nietzsche.

It had been Anatoly, of all people, who had taught that sentiment to Oliver, even if he hadn’t quoted it directly. His brother-in-arms approach to The Bratva had been to use a criminal and immoral force to fight against the corruption of his country’s government and protect the people who no one else would. At the same time, Anatoly had known the risk, that it would be far too easy to lose himself into the darker, base, parts of his humanity. He had warned Oliver as much the first time he had seen the monster. Then, in Russia, at the beginning of The Green Arrow, before the monster truly had a hold on him, Anatoly had warned of the risk. He had known, even then, what Oliver had not. That giving the monster a persona didn’t keep it further away, it brought it closer. By the time Oliver had realised that, he had been staring into the abyss for far too long, and he had blinked. The monster didn’t control him, Oliver was aware of it enough to not fall completely into its deceptive embrace. It had hold on him enough though. Oliver had made too many trades, too many gashes in his soul to ever return to the man he had been.

But it didn’t matter to him. If protecting the innocent meant becoming a monster to take on worse monsters, it was a trade Oliver was willing to make. One he had made time and again. Not only had he repeatedly made the trade, he had never once questioned making it. In his very core he had known that it had been the right thing to do. Part of him loathed how easy it had been every single time, simply knowing how willing he had been to trade his soul away drove another dagger through what remained of it. “ _For in much wisdom, there is much grief_ ”, Ecclesiastes 1:18. It had been one of the things that Master Jansen had taught Oliver during his time at the Ashram in California. With knowledge, came understanding. But with that understanding, awareness of the true nature of reality, of humanity. Human nature, the real truth of it, that was what justified the things Oliver did.

Kara had begun to understand it more and more.

Over a month into her training, into them both intently studying The Triad, and Kara had begun to see things like him. On her insistence, Oliver had taken her out into the field, never to engage in active combat, but to study crime scenes before the police arrived. Each time had been a lesson in two parts. For one, all the theory in the world did nothing to prove Kara could pick apart a crime scene in person. Her grasp on the skillset Oliver taught her had been solid when they were in The Quiver, but it was different in the field. He shouldn’t have been surprised when Kara’s theoretical understanding translated almost perfectly to the real world.

The second reason called out to the darkness inside him. With a twisted glee Oliver had shown Kara crime scene photos from various Triad cases, and that had let her see the reality of humanity. Putting that same image in front of her, without the safety net of looking at it through a computer screen had hammered it home to her. When Oliver had first shown Kara crime scene reports in The Quiver, he had seen the crushing hopelessness in her eyes and felt part of himself thrill at it. The first scene she saw with her own eyes did more than just pull out a sense of hopelessness, Oliver watched her resign herself to it. In that very moment, he knew that Kara had embraced it. Just like he had done, Kara found herself looking into the abyss for the second time in her life. And it had looked back at her.

They had been tightly on The Triad, and inched ever closer to finding an in. Oliver knew he could have moved on them before, but it would have been blunt force, picking a target and storming it with full lethality. He needed to be more careful than that. With the ever present force of the American government haunting his every step, Oliver had to stay ahead. Barrelling into a fight without properly picking his targets was a sure fire way to get dead. With Kara too, he knew the extra risk. She was still raw, unfocused. Dropped into an all-out firefight she would make too much noise, it would bring too much heat down on them, or worse she’d make a mistake that would get them killed.

So, they played the slow game. They worked all the angles, and studied all the intel that Oliver’s various connections brought to them. While they did, while they were forced to wait, and watch, and plan, things between them had more time to spiral. The longer they took to find a strong point to take on The Triad with, the longer The Triad had to drop bodies.

A girl, barely eighteen, had been the final nail in the coffin for what remained of Kara’s youthful hope.

It had been violence on a scale Kara had never borne witness to before. From what they had been able to tell at the scene, in the limited time before the SCPD made a mess of the evidence, the girl had been tortured before a single clean cut had ripped her jugular open. Slits had been cut in the skin of her thighs and then her killer had forced the wounds apart until they tore. Oliver had seen it before. Simple, crude, and very effective. Telling Kara as much had been a gut-swooping experience. She hadn’t been able to see it at first, her mind couldn’t quite comprehend the level of sadism that was needed to willingly inflict that level of suffering on another human. Oliver had known it, because he had lived it.

In Hong Kong, in Russia, and even on the streets of Star City, Oliver had used that exact same torture, or methods like it to get what he needed. Torture, it was a doubled edged sword. On levels beyond conscious thought, Oliver knew that he wouldn’t have been able to save the lives that he had, done the things that he had, without resorting to torture when he needed to. But even so, a part of him knew that that he could have done as much good without resorting to the levels that he so often did. Never once had he _needed_ to do so much harm to a person that they would never walk again. Never had he _needed_ to cause so much pain to a person that it would be felt as long as they lived. Never had he _needed_ to torture a person to death to extract information. But, part of him had _wanted_ to do those things.

Before he had ever used his skills to inflict torture on someone, Amada Waller had told him that he had an aptitude for it. Like Anatoly, she had seen something in him that he wouldn’t acknowledge until years later. There was a part of Oliver far larger than he was capable of admitting that enjoyed what he did, and that part of him couldn’t help but to admire the skill in what had been done to that poor girl.

He told Kara that they would have kept the girl alive while they did it, would have made her watch, compounding the pain she must have felt with terror. When Kara had looked to him to tell her why anyone would have chosen to torture a girl like that before killing her, Oliver had no reasons to give.

After that Kara’s rage, her unbridled fury at the world, her regret, her hatred at the institutions of The Justice League that stopped them from interfering, it all flared up in orders of magnitude more than Oliver had ever hoped for. Kara had become more determined in ways he hadn’t seen in any of his students. Her fighting style became more aggressive as she started to emulate Oliver’s own, not just using the moves he directly taught her. She began insisting on a shift in the philosophy he taught her, wanting to know better the sickness that infected humanity. Beyond all conscious thought, beyond all the barriers Oliver tired to put between himself and the darkness that infected him, he felt himself twist with a blood-soaked glee as it happened. As much as he had tried to supress the knowledge when he had made the offer, when he had started training her, Oliver had felt more than known the calculations that had occurred in the dark recess of his mind. For all his time crushing down _that_ voice in his mind, Oliver could do nothing in those moments as it climbed to the top, as it cried out in sick pleasure at watching _Supergirl_ sink to his level.

Even with that realisation, Oliver still changed his training regimen. At the start he had taught her Freud and Plato, how to disarm and disable an opponent, where to aim an arrow to deliver a knockout. As the weeks turned to months Oliver lectures were on Sun Tzu and military strategy, on Vlad Țepeș and torture, how to deliver lethal blows unarmed, and the precise points on the body to hit with an arrow to kill cleanly.

There were fleeting moments then, when Oliver questioned himself. He never hesitated in teaching those lessons to his other students. To him, it was all necessary, all invaluable in the name of context even if they would never apply it in the field. Roy and Helena had learnt the extremes because they wanted to use them, because they had needed to take control back from the world that had robbed them of it in the first place. Mia and Dinah had never gone that far. Both of them wanted to learn to understand the enemy, to know the minds of the people they wanted to fight, never to go to extremes themselves. Unlike the others, Kara had _asked_ to be taught those lessons. For a while, Oliver found himself questioning not only her motives, but his own. There were times as he watched her weaving killing patterns into the air with her hands, or pacing the training room floor with a copy of _The Art of War_ held between her hands, that he wondered if he had made the right decision.

The part of his mind that he had always supressed, the part that writhed and thrilled in violence and blood, rose up at those thoughts and crushed them. He didn’t have time to be empathetic, to worry about Kara’s motives.

 _“Reasons do not make you right, Mr Queen,”_ The voice of Talia al Ghul crept in again, the same voice that had saved his life on a hundred different occasions. _“Every pimp from here to Metropolis has a reason for every whore’s face they carve up, but that doesn’t make it right.”_

He offered to train Kara, and that was what he was going to do. Motives didn’t matter, reasons didn’t matter, actions mattered. Training Kara, giving her a new identity, and giving the world a member of The Justice League who truly knew the nature of humanity, that was his only goal. The voice laughed in the back of his mind, the voice that _knew_ he had other goals, other _reasons_. For all Oliver’s noble intentions, the part of him that he had tired to keep supress gained only another foothold in his mind as Kara became more and more like him. To make Kara like him as a vigilante, Oliver had to make her like him as a person, and that both terrified and excited different parts of him. 

With the change in training, and Kara’s change in outlook, things between them had changed too.

Even with, or maybe because of, their wilful ignorance at the deeper connection between them, the sex had never been much more than that. They would train, anger, and Oliver would pin Kara to the wall or floor and drive himself into her until they both collapsed in a trembling tangle of limbs. As Kara threw off what ties she had to her _“humanity”_ things became more intense. She had started to initiate things between them; would bite and suck hungrily at his neck when she fought well enough to pin him, would intentionally brush against him during combat in ways she knew would arouse him, would trap him when he was sat reading and sink to her knees. The intensity of it became more than the fierce denial of emotional attraction that it had been at the beginning. And yet, somehow less. By some unspoken agreement, they had become more distant. Where at first they had kissed, languid and excitable, they fought for dominance with one another in a fury of teeth and tongues. Where they had first held each other in the afterglow, it had become almost a game of chicken to see who would move away first.

In their sightless fury at the world, in their own self-loathing and reluctance, Oliver and Kara had locked themselves into an orbital pattern. They had become a cometary, like planetary masses in deep space. They drifted close, collided together, and retreated into infinite darkness of their selves. Over and over again.

By the time either of them noticed it happening, the mission had become more important. Kara had been the one to close down any chance of them talking, as she marched into the training space one afternoon with the words:

“I’ve found our way in.”


End file.
